Facility Uses Force Of Nature To Test Buildings

A revolution is taking place in Richburg, 45 miles from uptown Charlotte.

“We're going to change the way construction in this country is designed and built,” Julia Rochman, with the Institute for Business and Home Safety, said. “We're going to settle for nothing less than that.”

Rochman offered a sneak peek Friday at a $40 million research facility that she said will lead to safer homes everywhere. Its purpose is to re-create the worst that Mother Nature has to offer, and then find ways to stand up to it.

“Nobody's ever done this on the planet before, tested full-scale buildings with realistic, repeatable natural conditions,” she said.

Rochman and her colleagues will do that with 105 giant fans, which will create enough energy to power 9,000 homes.

“So we want to make a hurricane -- a category 1 or 2 or 3 hurricane -- with that gustiness and the dynamics of the wind flow,” she said.

Chester County Supervisor Carlisle Roddey said it would be impossible to overstate how much the facility will mean to the local economy.

“It's not every day you've got something nobody else in the world has got, and we've got it here,” Roddey said.

The facility stands on 90 acres of its own land, but the county still owns hundreds of acres nearby, which Roddey said he hopes will attract spinoff businesses.

He admitted that when he first heard the idea, he was unsure.

“I thought they [were] out of their minds,” Roddey said. “I mean I did. I thought, ‘Who wants to come down where we [are] at and do stuff like that?’ But boy, I found out real quick they knew what they [were] doing.”

Full-scale testing at the facility will start in the fall.

“Turn on the fans and make some rain and some hail and some fire, and see what happens,” Rochman said.

The facility is being paid for almost entirely by insurance companies. Twenty people will work there permanently, but currently, about 100 people are working there on construction.